Diplomatic World 67

Vesta - Mechelse Cubalaya - CCP11, Seduzione. Koen Vanmechelen. Galleria degli Uffizi, 2022 Installation view, Medusa by Caravaggio (middle) and Koen Vanmechelen, Seduzione, Uffizi Galleries, 2022 Photo: Francesco Allegretto
My installations are meant to encourage a Cosmopolitan Renaissance,
developing new philosophies, ideas, and approaches that
could herald new and better futures. Reason why, interspersed
among Uffizi’s paintings and statues, you can find my Temptation
sculptures: 15 marble busts inspired by the Classical sculptures
of figures such as Augustus, Caesar, Hermes, Niobe, Plautilla,
and Socrates. Emperors, philosophers, warriors, heroes, and
divinities. They all carry a cracked glass egg from which hybrid
creatures spring forth, representing the mind’s freeing and imagination.
They create an evocative and disorienting journey around
the idea of seduction, offering a kind of hymn to the power of life
and the regenerating, although sometimes monstrous, force of
the natural world.
Another realisation hit me when I left the Uffizi the day before the
official opening. Some museums might indeed risk becoming
tombs, offering works without a context, masterpieces that have
just become mere projections of the occasional visitor’s mindscape.
Art always carries the generations and their contexts.
Its meaning cannot be interpreted without knowing the nest it
emerged from.
I stopped at Caravaggio’s Medusa after lingering in front of works
of Raphael, Michelangelo, and the Flemish Painters. The Medusa
was made at the end of the 16th century. The start of science,
of the world economy, of interconnectedness. People from the
Middle East, Europe, Central, South and North America, Asia and
Oceania connected with people from distant cultures. Wars of
ideas were fought. It was the beginning of the Eurocentric and
anthropocentric biases. But it was also a time when nature was
in abundance, the wilderness was not tamed yet, and scientists
in different places and cultures had different systems for naming
life. Then, only a fraction of all the green growth on Earth was
consumed by humans.
One can only truly grasp the meaning of Caravaggio’s Medusa
if one realises this was a time new narratives were being born
and were flooding past ones, when a global movement of genes
and memes was violently kickstarted, giving an opening to the
creation of new worlds. As usual, creations always appear out of
confrontations.
The Renaissance was the start of the effort by humanity to
control the unstoppable forces of nature. They chose not to work
with the planet but to control it. Rob Dunn, in A Natural History of
the Future, puts it like this: “We seek, collectively, to simplify the
living world and channel it into our service, to circumscribe it so
fully within our powers that it ceases even to be visible.”
The Cosmopolitan Renaissance encourages a more loving and
healing embrace of the broader natural ecosystem. This is a particularly
salient and poignant point in the context of our ongoing
pandemic, which is an urgent warning to what could follow.
I quote Dunn again: “Even under the most optimistic scenarios,
by the year 2080, hundreds of millions of species will need to
migrate to new regions and even new continents to survive. We
are reshaping nature at unprecedented scales, and for the most
part, we are absentmindedly looking the other way while doing
so.” Conclusion: we must reshape our minds and perspective
in relation to the world. We have to make a new canvas for ourselves
and the rest of life on our planet.
The question then is: which painting would you like to live in?
Or better yet: in which painting do we live? I remember a mysterious
children’s book about a strange man who took refuge
in a painting in times of need. How big was that other world he
Vesta, Seduzione, Koen Vanmechelen, Uffizi Galleries, 2022
Photo: Francesco Allegretto
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